EMILIO’S CARNIVAL

or, Senilità

A new translation of the late (1861–1923) Italian modernist’s second (1898) novel (also known as A Man Grows Older), a grimly comic study of indecision and ennui that pointed the way to Svevo’s later masterpiece, Zeno’s Conscience (see below). The story depicts dilettantish failed writer Emilio Brentani’s irrational fixation on a heartless slut (the quite unangelic Angiolina)—an obsession memorably counterpointed against the loveless enervation of his spinster sister Amalia (whose very name mockingly echoes his): “the personification of thought and pain.” Emilio’s farcical psychic unraveling and gradual surrender to “senility”—at the age of 35—are painstakingly evolved in a little-known landmark psychological novel.